


When I Was Younger I Was Torn, Afraid and Lonely

by bobina



Category: Glee
Genre: Angst, F/F, Gen, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 13:40:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/761960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobina/pseuds/bobina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of firsts for Quinn and Santana. They have been shaped and molded by circumstance, but they have the chance to find themselves together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When I Was Younger I Was Torn, Afraid and Lonely

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this one-shot in about two hours tonight. It's the first fic I've finished in over 3 years and I hope it resonates with anyone else. This is sort-of, kind-of canon-compliant if you squint and tilt your head, and of course I added my own spin. If you read it, I'd love to know what you think of it!
> 
> Title comes from Pete Droge's "Straylin Street." Other song lyrics belong to "Cruel and Clumsy" by Chris Pureka and "The Sea and The Rhythm" by Iron & Wine.
> 
> Please do not copy/re-post without permission.

When Santana Lopez is four years old, she learns the word _odio_.

Her abuela is old and mean and Santana thinks the things she says are silly. A wink, just for Santana, usually accompanies every insult she slings. It’s how they bond.

But when Santana is four and her mother allows her new friend Noah to come over and play after preschool, her abuela’s insults are not funny. They’re about him, and the funny little hat on his head that he calls a yarmulke, and they make her mother angry and Santana’s stomach twist.

Noah lets her play with his Tonka trucks and is funny-mean like Santana’s abuela. That’s why she picked him over Finn with his goofy smile and too-long arms, or that shy boy Kurt who gets hurt so easily. She thought her abuela would like the things Noah said, but she doesn’t want anything to do with him. Calls him names without even knowing his real one first.

 Noah doesn’t understand because Santana’s abuela and her mother are speaking _en_ _Español,_ but Santana does and she understands that she hates her grandmother for every real-mean thing she’s ever said.

~*~*~*~

Lucy Fabray is nine years old the first time her father calls her fat. Her cheeks burn with shame and tears sting her eyes. She clenches her jaw and doesn’t let them fall. He is already distracted by something her grandfather is saying, something about “those damn towel-heads” that she’d rather not know about.

Her cousin Jameson joined the Army yesterday and the Thanksgiving dinner table is already tense. Her mother has had six glasses of wine (Lucy counted) and she slurs her words. Lucy just wanted a second piece of pumpkin pie, something sweet to distract her from the sourness of the day.

“Better not, my little Lucy Caboosey,” her father had warned. “You want to get rid of that baby fat soon, don’t you?”

He had laughed. So had her sister, and Jameson, and her aunts and uncles.

Lucy Fabray was nine years old when she understood what it meant to hate herself.

~*~*~*~

It’s raining so hard outside that she can’t see across the street. That’s what Santana remembers, years later when she’s feeling nostalgic, of the first time she let anyone fuck her. That, and that Noah – Puck now – smells like wet grass and her father’s aftershave.

Dave Karofsky’s words from earlier that day, overheard while she waited for Puck to finish showering in the boy’s locker room after football practice, still echo in her mind.

Puck kisses her greedily and she fights down rage long enough to kiss him back. His hands are sloppy and his body is suffocating, but she lets him push her down on his bed. She closes her eyes when he tugs her shirt off and her mind wanders.

_“Hey Neilson, I heard Brittany Pierce is looking to score a perfect record. Who do you think she’ll do next?”_

She bites Puck’s lip and scratches her nails down his back. She wonders when it’ll be over.

_“I don’t know, Karofsky, she seems awfully close to Santana. You think they’re… you know? More than friends?”_

Santana wraps her legs around Puck’s hips and twists, rolling them over and effectively reversing positions. He reaches for her chest but she slaps at his hands. Puck showed her a porno last year that said this was called the Cowgirl. It seemed to do the trick in the movie and she just wants to go home and call Brittany.

_“Yeah, man, I bet Lopez is a total man-hating dyke. No wonder she’s such a bitch all the time!”_

That word echoes behind her eyelids as Puck suddenly thrusts into her, groaning and squeezing at her hips. He slumps back on the bed with a look of surprise and she smirks. This will be all over school by first bell tomorrow morning if she knows Puck.

Who’s the dyke now?

~*~*~*~

They meet at cheerleading camp the summer before their first year at William McKinley High School, a mandatory prerequisite for all freshmen who want to try out for the five-time national champion cheerleading squad, the Cheerios.

Santana is gangly and mean. Brittany Pierce clings to her side and they seem like an unstoppable force. Other girls skitter away from them in deference.

Lucy goes by her middle name now, Quinn, and has spent the last year of junior high practicing and perfecting the haughty superiority that came so naturally to her sister. She notices Santana staring and walks over to the pair to introduce herself, her high ponytail swishing gently against the back of her neck.

“I’ve been watching you three.” Coach Sylvester’s voice booms suddenly at them from Quinn’s left. The three girls look over at their coach in unison. “I’m putting you in charge of the routine today. Screw it up and you’re off the squad.”

She scrutinizes them, expecting fear. Quinn and Santana just smile conspiratorially. The three of them speak in unison.

“We won’t let you down, Coach.”

~*~*~*~

The first time Quinn gets high is a lot like the first time she drinks. She doesn’t end up pregnant again – thank God – but she does wake up in a haze with newly pink hair and an ugly tattoo on her back. Her father had moved back in with her mother the day before, which meant that father and daughter were under the same roof for the first time in almost three years.

 The Mack had given her horse tranquilizers and a bottle of tequila and told her they were going on an adventure. Quinn is never quite able to remember that night in full, but she knows it felt good. Freeing.

She gets high most of the time now and goes home as little as possible.

She likes dropping acid when she watches the Cheerios practice from her spot under the bleachers. It keeps her from missing them, and it makes their performances _insane._ Santana and Brittany know she’s there. They always seem to look her way during water breaks and she never blinks. They only come over to her once, when Coach Sylvester is distracted by a group of freshmen who can’t keep up with the routine. She feels like she should be touched that they care, but she doesn’t and blows them off.

Her father hits her for the first time that night when she stumbles home drunk at 2 AM.

Quinn waits in her room until he’s stopped yelling at her through the door. Her mother finally coaxes him to bed and Quinn waits another half an hour before sneaking into the bathroom. She takes all of her mom’s Xanax and goes downstairs to finish off the bottle of vodka her father cracked open yesterday.

They find her unconscious on the back porch the next morning.

She wakes up in a hospital bed alone and ashamed.

~*~*~*~

 Santana has never sung to anyone but Brittany before. It always meant something, then. She could see it in the way Brittany looked at her with tears in her eyes and a smile quirking the corners of her lips. Quinn doesn’t smile, or tear up, or move. Santana holds her hand and tries not to let the incessant beeping of machines distract her from her rhythm.

_Sweet air through the summer screen,_  
_tall grass and warm stones_  
_where are you today?_  
_'Cause you're missing it all._

Quinn looks fragile and small against the white sheets of the hospital bed. Santana wonders briefly if that sounds clichéd but decides she doesn’t care. Her best friend almost died today: she’s allowed cliché.

_But you wanted something you saw in the sunset  
so don't you leave here 'til you know what it is._

Santana tries not to look at the bandages covering Quinn’s left arm, or the tiny butterfly strips holding the myriad of cuts on Quinn’s face closed. She tries not to think about the hours of surgery Quinn went through as afternoon bled into evening to repair her shattered hip and relieve the pressure on her spine. She wishes Brittany could be here with them, her father only able to get visitation clearance for Santana. She wishes Rachel and Finn hadn’t been so selfish in insisting their stupid wedding had to be today.

_And let's turn to the West_  
_and let's turn up the music_  
_and let's hope it's always as good as this._

She wishes Quinn would wake up.

~*~*~*~

They don’t talk about it, after. They try to make it just another day in a long line of days between them that further confuses the lines of friendship. Santana goes back to New York with Kurt and Rachel, and Quinn goes back to New Haven, alone.

They think about it, though, separately and in their own ways.

Quinn finds her eyes fluttering closed as the first warm breeze of spring tickles across the back of her neck. Her body reacts much the same way it did when Santana’s breath and hands did the same thing. It makes her flush with a mixture of embarrassment and arousal and she hurries to her women’s studies class. That night plays over in her head through the entire lecture, along with snippets of a song she’s not sure she’s ever heard before.

When Santana is drunk and Rachel and Kurt have gone to bed, she watches rain pelt the city outside through the window and weeps over the scars she found at Quinn’s hip, the scars she kissed with something like reverence when she was given the chance.

They keep in touch through other people. They send each other text messages when the world is too big in the darkest hours of night.

It takes Santana two months before she calls Quinn on her birthday. She’s drunk because she can’t seem to function otherwise since that night. She sings to Quinn for the second time ever.

_Tonight we're the sea and the salty breeze;_  
_The milk from your breast is on my lips_  
_and lovelier words from your mouth to me_  
_when salty my sweat and fingertips._  
  
_Our hands they seek the end of afternoons;_  
_My hands believe and move over you._

Quinn hangs up on her.

She calls back the next day to apologize. Quinn was drunk as well, angered by a curt and impersonal birthday card from her parents. Santana was the only other person to remember her birthday at all and it confused her. _Santana_ confuses her and always has.

Her belly tingles when she asks if Santana will finish the song for her.

She does.

END.


End file.
